Wal-Mart comes to Davis Square

[ron_newman]

No, not the store, but one of their empty shopping carts. In the past week I've seen it in two different places on Day Street, and now next to the bike racks in Seven Hills Park behind the Holland Street T entrance.

I have no idea how it got here, since the closest Wal-Mart store is 9 miles away in Lynn.

Cheap Cranberries?

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

Does anyone know who has the cheapest cranberries around? I've been going nuts with them, but at $2.49 per 12oz bag*, it can get expensive. Have any of y'all found 'em cheaper? Where? I know we're in the last throes of being able to find them fresh, so I'd like to stock up.

(*Whole Foods also had 1 lb containers for the discount price of $4.99. !?!)

Davis Area Free Films Dec. 7th -9th

[josephineave.livejournal.com]

A grand total of 3 films to see in the area this week as Tufts wraps up classes on Monday.

* Sunday 8 pm: Tufts Film Series screening of "The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian"
* Tuesday 6:30 pm: Somerville Library screening of "The Wind That Shakes the Barley"
* Tuesday 7 pm: Tufts screening of 4 student films for social change (includes "Honkumentary: No Noise is Illegal" about Davis' Honkfest)
( Coming attractions... )

Property values in Davis Sq (and Somerville)

[nvidia99999.livejournal.com]

I just saw in the Somerville News an estimate saying that property values in Somerville declined 2% this year:
http://www.thesomervillenews.com/main.asp?SectionID=2&SubSectionID=2&ArticleID=218. Somebody mentioned that Zillow actually reports a loss of about 8%. This is confusing. The Editor of the Somerville News pointed out that Zillow does not have accurate estimates. In my experience, Zillow is pretty on the mark when it comes to sale prices, they seem to be doing lots of good stats on their datasets. Any idea on how to gather additional information on this? I doubt one can trust the Somerville News, given that it was created by the owners of ERA, one of the Somerville Real Estate agencies (clearly, they would not want to advertise that property values are going down around here).

One funny tidbit. Have you received a pack of coupon last week? I received one, and one of the coupons was an ad for ERA, the Norton Group. It says: "Voted #1 Real Estate Company 2000 to 2007 By the readers of the Somerville News"! Now, when many of the readers are ERA employees or relatives of ERA employees, that is a bit of a conflict of interest, isn't it? :)